Ellison scratched his wrist, maybe an ant bite. Then Ellison's head came up. He looked left and right between the stalks. Something was amiss. The towhee and wren were abruptly silent. The buzz and clatter of insects had quieted. Even the wind had stopped, and the heat was suddenly thick and choking.
The prickly rash of fear crawled up Ellison's back. He had experienced this sensation once before, in the cornfield just before he was arrested, an indefinable sense that something was awry. He was no longer alone in the cottonwood glen. Somebody was closing in on him. Surely the DEA.
Ellison rose quickly, and more sweat dropped onto his glasses. He turned south toward the house, his view blocked by the tall marijuana stalks. But surely his pursuers had come from the house. He dropped his paper bag and turned north, ducking his head to hide below the top leaves of his plants. Still he heard and saw nobody. The sweat spread on his lenses, smearing his view. He turned left toward a brace of dwarf maples, brushing by the last of his plants. Then a man appeared before him, forming out of the maple leaves, obscured by the droplets on Ellison's lenses. A huge man with a blond plug head. Moving toward him.
The old hippie turned back, willing his legs to work, sprinting through the marijuana stalks. The once friendly leaves seemed to grab for him. He missed his footing on a cottonwood root and fell to one knee. He rose, limping, pushing himself forward. His breath rattled in his throat. Dear God, he didn't want to go back to prison.
The marijuana stalks ahead of him parted, and the big man was there. Ellison jerked his eyes over his shoulder. Were there two of them? How could he have moved so quickly? Panic rose in Ellison. Six years this time, maybe eight, every day of it spent as some con's girlfriend. A wail of fear escaped his lips. He dodged right, toward a thimbleberry thicket, his feet churning the loose soil. His chest heaved. He swatted aside vegetation and braved a look over his shoulder. He had lost the intruder. He turned back toward the thimbleberry, and there the big man was again, smiling slightly and raising a hand.
Panic almost closing his throat, Ellison turned again. His legs seemed made of rope but he dug at the ground and flailed at the vegetation as if swimming, pulling himself through the underbrush. He groaned with effort and his vision blurred even more.
Then he was on the ground, his face hard against the dirt, a rough hand at the back of his neck pinning him there. Ellison inhaled deeply, drawing in bits of dirt. Helpless, he closed his eyes. Six to eight years this time.
The hand rolled Ellison over. The intruder towered over him, the details of his face lost in the sun overhead. The hand gripped Ellison's arm and easily brought him to his feet.
"It's this scar, isn't it?"
Ellison was still blowing loudly, and he thought perhaps he hadn't heard the man. "A scar?"
"It frightens people." A blocky voice, unaccustomed to the language.
"Where's my Miranda rights?" Ellison was suddenly angry. He peeled off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt sleeve. When he returned them to his nose, he wished he hadn't. Seen closely and clearly, the intruder was even more frightening. Chopped face, gash of a mouth, and a red and scaled dent above his right eye that disappeared back under the blond hair. The scar made everything on his face seem askew.
"I demand my Miranda rights, goddamnit. Where's the protocol?"
"I need a bed for the night."
"A bed?" The slightest flutter of hope. "You just want a bed?"
The stranger nodded.
The six to eight years vanished. "Thank you, God." Ellison turned toward the shack. His confidence soared. "I don't mind saying you scared the hell out of me."
"I do that a lot." The accent was strong. "Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not."
The trailer was cramped and hot. Squeezed between banks of electronics, Pete Coates drummed his fingers on a tiny metal table. "Can't you hurry up?"
"I'll tell the pilot to rock back and forth in his seat to make his plane go faster," the technician replied with a Southern accent, not bothering to look at Coates.
The technician was an Air Force captain assigned to PHOTINT Tasking and was the master of the trailer, which was called a C3, for command, control, and communications. The trailer and the captain and the reconnaissance planes were on loan to Coates and the FBI. The technician had given Coates a ten-minute tour of the trailer, which consisted of both men slowly turning in their chairs as the technician pointed out one system after another, speaking mostly in unfathomable acronyms like SIGMA and MAC and TOT and DISCUS, all communications systems. The interior of the trailer glowed in soft green light from several monitors. Coates faced a wall of digital numbers, blinking red and green and yellow lights, dials and knobs and switches. The trailer was filled with a faint crackling. Three monitors were black but with the tiny power lights glowing red. On another monitor was ESPN.
After the tour of the communications equipment, Coates had asked, "You sure it's a car in there?" The captain had once again reviewed his evidence: an Army Beechcraft RC-12d — a plane notable for the dozen antennas protruding from its wings and fuselage — had with its UAS-4 infrared equipment detected heat coming from a dilapidated barn in Jefferson County, in foothill country. Within an hour Coates's team had checked the farmstead against the Jefferson County tax assessor's rolls and determined that the Allcrop Corporation, the parent company of the Rocking R Ranch, was paying property taxes on the land, and that the county assessor had dropped the structure component of the assessment on the parcel three times as the farm and barn fell into disrepair. So there should not have been a heat source in the dilapidated barn, yet there was.
"A yellow Buick Regal is what I'm looking for," Coates offered once again. "That's the last car Trusov stole, and we haven't found it abandoned anywhere, so he's still got it."
The technician nodded. "The second plane should be there by now. We'll see what shows up."
The Beechcraft had not been equipped with cameras, and in any event the plane had covered the ground too quickly to take still photographs, so another plane, a Grumman Mohawk from Fort Ord, had been sent for a second fly-by. The Mohawk was a multisensor tactical observation and reconnaissance platform equipped with an ESSWACS (electronic solid-state wide-angle camera system), a five lens assembly that focused light onto five charge-coupling devices. The five currents were sent through an on-board video processor, then through a multiplex system to turn them into a single burst of digital pulses. The plane carried a stabilized transmitter in a helmet-sized blister under its starboard wing, which would send it to an LOS (line of sight) relay station atop Moller Mountain. The signal would be instantly forwarded to the trailer, and the picture reconstructed on the monitor in front of Coates and the technician.
"Still enough light, you think?" Coates asked.
The tech glanced at his wristwatch. "It's only eight-thirty. The sun sets late this time of year. There'll be enough light."
Coates was counting on the tumbledown barn to be missing shingles. He rubbed his forehead with frustration. "I thought I had Nikolai Trusov bottled up in New York."
"Sounds like he got out."
"He went through my so-called impenetrable ring like crap through a goose, goddamn him anyway."
"You know, Detective, I've read the FBI's case report on your Russian. He's a hard man."
"He is that."